Back in February, during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Google showed its new Goggles Translation service the first time, when the prototype was only recognizing German text. The idea behind Goggles Translate is that traveling to another country can be an amazing experience. The opportunity to immerse yourself in a different culture can give you a new perspective. However, ordering food from a menu you can not read can be an adventure. With today's release, Goggles Translate can read English, French, Italian, German and Spanish and translate snapped info to many more languages, just my making a photo, for instance from a menu.

Point your phone at a word or phrase. Use the region of interest button to draw a box around specific words Press the shutter button

If Goggles recognizes the text, it will give you the option to translate

Press the translate button to select the source and destination languages.

Google said today, it's hard working to extend the recognition capabilities to other Latin-based languages and its goal is to eventually read non-Latin languages (such as Chinese, Hindi and Arabic) as well.

Goggles Translate is part of today's new Google Goggles release which contains at least one new feature and a large number of improvements with every new release. In addition to translation, Goggles v1.1 features improved barcode recognition, a larger corpus of artwork, recognition of many more products and logos, an improved user interface and the ability to initiate visual searches using images in your phone's photo gallery.

Google Goggles v1.1 is now available from the Android Market and requires Android 1.6 or higher.